I broke a lease once, about a year into a three-year term, and I got out cheap because of a clause I had not read until the morning I needed it: two months' rent, capped, whatever time was left. I felt clever for about a week.
The landlord was not ruined by me. But the tenant who came after me paid a number that quietly included the cost of people like me. I did not pay for my exit. Somebody did.
That is the whole subject of what follows, scaled up by about 1.4 gigawatts.
Start with the part nobody in this fight disputes
On December 18, 2025, the Michigan Public Service Commission — the state body that decides what a utility may charge and why — conditionally approved two contracts between DTE Electric and Green Chile Ventures LLC, a subsidiary of Oracle: a primary supply agreement for electricity and a separate energy storage agreement. It approved them ex parte — on the papers, with no contested case, no discovery, nobody under oath.
The load is 1,383 megawatts, which everyone rounds to 1.4 gigawatts. Erik Nordman of Michigan State University's Institute of Public Utilities told public radio the site would draw slightly less than the entire electricity consumption of the City of Detroit — roughly a quarter of DTE's current load. That is a scholar's estimate on a radio program, not a figure in any filing, worth knowing since it is the line everyone repeats.
The commission did not simply wave it through. It conditioned approval on DTE being responsible for any costs to serve the 1,383-megawatt data center that it cannot recover from the customer, and on interrupting that load first in an emergency. The terms do exceed the standard large-customer tariff: nineteen years rather than five, and a minimum billing demand of 80% of the contract capacity — the customer pays for 80% of the power it reserved whether it uses a watt or not — against 50% to 60% in the general tariff.
The project went ahead regardless: Saline Township's board and planning commission flat-out rejected it in September 2025 and the excavators came anyway; the $16 billion campus secured financing from Blackstone and PIMCO-managed accounts in April 2026, months before a court says whether the contracts underneath it were lawful.
Here is the uncomfortable part. By the day of the vote, 5,537 public comments sat in the docket, and none bought anybody the right to ask a question. The vote closed the door on testimony before any was filed; intervenors were denied the opportunity to seek discovery, submit expert testimony, or question the company's witnesses; and the contracts were public only in a highly redacted form, which is how the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan puts it.
The clause the whole argument actually lives inside
Two mechanisms do the work here, and they are not the same.
The first is that minimum billing demand — the you-pay-whether-or-not-you-show-up clause. It runs for the life of the contract. If the racks go in half empty, the bill does not care.
The second is the termination payment: what it costs to leave. Under the supply agreement it is built to recover at least ten years of the minimum monthly charge — the minimum billing demand times the greater of the months remaining until the tenth anniversary of load ramp completion, or 24 months. After that anniversary, the exit price drops to a flat 24 months. The commission put the resulting minimum termination amounts at approximately $2.3 billion under the supply agreement and $3.9 billion under the storage agreement, negotiated, it found, to protect DTE against default.
The contract runs nineteen years. The termination payment is built on ten. One intervenor put it to the commission in a phrase: that leaves nine years "unprotected by the termination payment." An advocate's characterization in a filing, not a finding — but the arithmetic under it is the commission's own.
Then the collateral. Standing behind all of it is a parent guaranty, "bolstered by a letter of credit," the order says, "as necessary based on the parent's credit rating." A promise from a large company, topped up with bankable security only if somebody later decides it should be.
What sharpens it is the comparison set: three documents, one regulator, nine months.
Six weeks earlier, on November 6, 2025, the same commission approved a large-load tariff for Consumers Energy: fifteen-year minimum term, 80% minimum billing demand, four years' notice, and an exit fee equal to the minimum monthly bill times the number of months remaining on the customer's contract, with default collateral at half that fee. Not ten years. All of them.
Three months later, DTE opened the generic docket the December order had told it to open — Case No. U-22061, rewriting the standard tariff for everyone who comes next. (Keep the two straight: U-21990 is the Oracle contracts; U-22061 is the rulebook after.) There, for loads above 100 megawatts, DTE proposed an administrative fee of $100,000 or $250,000 and a termination fee of 15 years of the customer's minimum billing demand, with collateral in the amount of the full termination fee.
This month, the coalition answered. In testimony filed August 4, 2026, Ben Havumaki of Synapse Energy Economics — appearing for the Michigan Attorney General, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club — recommended a minimum billing demand of 90 percent rather than 80 percent of contract capacity, parent guarantees excluded as a default form of collateral in favor of cash or a letter of credit, four years' notice, and a termination fee set by the months remaining. His charge: DTE's proposed provisions are, in several respects, "out of step with the Consumers tariff and less protective of other customers."
Three answers to one question — what does it cost to walk away, and who is holding the deposit?
Now the strongest version of the commission's case
I owe this side a fair hearing; parts of it are good.
Start with what the critics understate: the minimum billing demand does not expire. If the load never materializes, the customer still pays 80% of contracted capacity, for nineteen years. The nightmare people describe — a building goes quiet, the bill lands on households — is not what this contract says happens. Somebody has to terminate first.
Second, the conditions have teeth. If the specified collateral proves insufficient, the December order states flatly that all risk associated with the sufficiency of the collateral shall be borne by DTE Electric, not by ratepayers. Commissioner Katherine Peretick said as much: if the affordability analysis turns out optimistic, DTE bears the responsibility of any extra costs. On rehearing in March 2026 the commission denied the petitions and let the approval stand — for lack of standing first, and, in the alternative, because the objectors had shown no error.
Third, there is a claimed upside. DTE calculated a net benefit to other customers of approximately $300 million — though the order describes its own exhibit as appearing to show roughly $150 million in 2027 ramping to $300 million in 2029. A projection on a curve, not a check in the mail — and not "$300 million a year," however often you see it written.
The market-side argument deserves airtime. The American Enterprise Institute argues that data centers have not raised rates to date, that whether they do depends on whether regulators let supply expand, and that this points to price policies that make large customers pay their own way, not to moratoria. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation goes further: a well-managed large load may even improve overall capacity utilization, which could pull rates down for everyone else. Conditional claims, both — and honest. Nobody has yet shown a Michigan household paying more because of this contract; the dispute is about what happens if.
Which leaves the sentence I cannot stop rereading. Assessing its own protections, the commission found that they "mitigate some risk" of cost subsidization. Some. And the order adds that approving the contracts does not approve future recovery of stranded costs from existing customers. The hardest question was not answered. It was scheduled.
For five years Dublin had a freeze nobody ever called a ban
There is another way to handle the who-pays problem, and a small country across the Atlantic has now tried both versions of it.
Ireland is where this stopped being theoretical first. Its Central Statistics Office reports that data centers there took 23% of total metered electricity consumption in 2025, up from 5% in 2015. Dublin put the premise in writing in July 2022: capacity constraints and binding carbon budgets mean "not all existing demand for data centre development can be accommodated".
Now the part that gets misreported: Ireland never banned anything. Its energy regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, declined to impose a moratorium in 2021 on the grounds that it would have been disproportionate, and said again in its December 2025 decision that a moratorium is "not an appropriate or proportionate approach". What it issued instead were connection criteria: where you sit on the network, whether you can bring your own dispatchable generation equal to or greater than your demand, and whether you will cut consumption when asked.
The effect was a five-year freeze nobody ever formally declared. RTÉ describes what ended in December 2025 as a de facto moratorium on new connections in the greater Dublin area. A Dublin law firm was blunter: despite the regulator's stated position, the onerous criteria had "the net effect of a de facto data centre connection moratorium".
Then the timing, which I promise I did not arrange. On December 12, 2025 — six days before Michigan approved the DTE contracts — the Irish regulator swapped that regime for conditions of its own. New data centers must meet at least 80% of their annual demand with additional renewable electricity projects generated in Ireland within six years of energizing the site, and anyone seeking a connection must install on-site generation or battery systems capable of meeting its full electricity demand. One flat prohibition survived the reopening, a single sentence in the grid operator's implementing policy: an application "cannot be progressed if it is in a constrained area".
Both jurisdictions moved to conditions in the same week, from opposite directions, and both are now in court: environmental groups were given the go-ahead by the High Court in April 2026 to challenge the Irish rules, the same month Michigan's Attorney General filed her appeal.
The difference that matters is not strictness. It is where the leverage sits. Ireland's is upstream of the connection: the operator can decline, and no clause has to be enforced years later. Michigan's is downstream, inside a nineteen-year contract that has to hold up in a world nobody can see yet. One is a decision. The other is a bet on drafting.
Just imagine it is the late 2030s
This next part is imagination, not prediction, and not a claim about anybody's intentions.
It is roughly a decade after the load ramp finished. The chips in that building are several generations old; inference has moved somewhere with cheaper power or colder air, or the economics shifted in a way nobody in 2026 could model. The tenant reads its options and finds that after the tenth anniversary, walking away costs 24 months of minimum monthly charges. Not nine remaining years. Two.
The substation and the transmission are built. Those assets are in the ground and in the rate base, and the coalition's appellate brief already puts that exposure at more than $500 million in new substation and transmission infrastructure, much of it recoverable through utility rates — an argument, to be clear, not a holding.
And the collateral? A parent guaranty is worth what the parent's balance sheet is worth on the day you call it, and the letter of credit behind it gets added "as necessary based on the parent's credit rating" — whenever somebody makes that call. Ten years is a long time in a technology company's credit rating. It is not long at all in the depreciation schedule of a substation.
Then the question the December order deliberately left open arrives for the first time, in a rate case, in front of commissioners nobody has heard of yet.
None of which is about one company. It is a clause architecture being standardized right now — Michigan already has a one-gigawatt Google request moving in Van Buren Township, tracked alongside the rest in the case file Earthjustice keeps on these dockets. Whatever U-22061 concludes is the template.
Who else is worried, and from which direction
This is not a left-right fight.
From the academy: Harvard Law School's environmental and energy law program reviewed nearly fifty regulatory proceedings and argued that rate structures and secret utility contracts could be transferring Big Tech's energy costs to the public. Could be — the paper describes a mechanism and a risk, and I will not upgrade its verb.
From the left, the AI Now Institute argues that large loads must face a tariff proportional to the cost of serving them, and that a separate rate class should be established outright. From the center, Brookings notes that turning any federal ratepayer pledge into real protection depends on states writing detailed tariff and cost-allocation rules — which is exactly what the Michigan tariff docket is.
From the right, the libertarian Cato Institute's energy policy director, Travis Fisher, says of that federal pledge that "there's no enforcement"; a Democratic climate group in the same reporting calls it toothless and vague. When Cato and Climate Power agree that a voluntary promise is unenforceable, what is left to argue about is the replacement. And the reason they all bother is that this is only getting bigger: US data centers consumed 4.4% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2023, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presents 2028 only as a scenario range, because nobody can forecast this honestly.
So what does this mean for you?
You will not read a sixty-page order this weekend. Here is the version that fits in a life.
Find your state's threshold. These rules only bite above a megawatt line, and the lines are wildly inconsistent — 10 MW in South Dakota to 150 MW in Alabama. DTE has proposed 100. A project a megawatt under the line gets no special protections at all.
Read the exit fee before the savings number. The headline benefit is a projection. The termination clause tells you what happens when the projection is wrong.
Ask what the collateral is made of. "Parent guaranty" and "irrevocable letter of credit" are not the same instrument. One is a promise; the other is money a bank has already set aside.
Understand that a comment is not leverage. Michigan's docket collected 5,537 and they bought nobody a cross-examination. Intervention, a contested case, or a call to your attorney general's utility division is leverage — that office has been asking since last fall what happens if the data center fails to purchase the full projected amount of electricity, leaves the state early, or goes bankrupt.
Watch the compliance filing, not just the order. The commission told DTE to represent that the customer's payments "will cover the costs to serve" it. DTE's acceptance letter instead said the aggregate revenues generated by the customer will cover those costs. Different sentence. The paperwork after the headline is where the words move.
Ask whether your protections live in a tariff or a statute. A tariff can be amended in a docket you will never hear about. A statute must survive a legislature.
The lesson, as I see it
The interesting policy is almost never in the announcement. It is in the clause about leaving.
Michigan's Attorney General has filed a claim of appeal of right, arguing that the shortcut the commission used covers only a rate change that will not increase the cost of service — and that the appeal is not just about this case, but every future data center case before the commission. In the first week of August 2026, she and an environmental coalition each filed opening briefs. DTE says its Oracle contracts offer some of the best customer protections in the country, which may well be true — a comparative claim about a field with a low bar. Watch what a utility offers when it wants something: in April 2026 DTE said it could pause rate-increase requests for at least two years if it got a "constructive" rate-case outcome and Saline came online by the end of 2027. The Attorney General called that a ransom note.
Nobody here is arguing about whether the data center gets built. It is under construction; the money closed. The argument is over the terms of a document almost nobody has read.
Ireland decided it was allowed to say no, and is being sued over how it says yes. Michigan decided to say yes and negotiate the price, and is being sued over how it decided. I do not think either is obviously wiser. But one of them puts the hard question off for a decade — and the commission's own word for what its protections accomplish was some.
Somebody near you is signing one of these right now, and the interesting part is never the announcement — it is the clause about leaving. If you know a person who sits on a township board, or who reads a utility bill with genuine suspicion, send this along; that is honestly where it gets decided. The HAIA Foundation reads the filings so you don't have to, and new pieces land here every week.